In an earlier post I talked about precursors to The Parent Trap (1961) and its far less piquant 1998 remake. I focused on the 1945 film Twice Blessed which, like The Parent Trap, features identical twins who switch places in order to reunite their divorced parents.
An even more instructive comparison, though, is with Universal Pictures’ Three Smart Girls (1936).
Three Smart Girls was directed by the Berlin-born Jewish director-screenwriter Henry Koster the same year that he fled Europe for the United States. Koster, who then knew little English, would later direct such films as Abbott and Costello’s One Night in the Tropics—with the comic duo’s “Who’s On First?” routine—and Harvey.
Koster’s American debut with Universal was also the feature film debut for actress-singer Deanna Durbin, little recalled today but Universal’s most bankable teenage star in the late 1930s and early 40s, and Universal’s backup choice for the film’s main role when Judy Garland was not obtainable.
The fourteen-year-old Durbin—the same age as Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap—plays Penny, the youngest of three feisty sisters of divorced parents who travel from their mother’s lakeside home in Switzerland to their father in New York City in order to thwart the latter’s planned remarriage.
Although we are not dealing with twins here (Durbin’s older sisters are played by Barbara Read and the Jessica Lange-esque stunner Nan Grey), other similarities to The Parent Trap are noticeable.
In both, the father is stalked by a blonde gold-digger who is assisted by her equally gold-digging mother. In both, the daughters are helped by loyal servants (nanny and butler) who are as committed as they to seeing the parents reunited. (Here the 1998 remake comes more to mind.) Both feature a portrait of the parents—or, here, the father—that represents the unspoken heartache hanging over the family. Both movies resemble fairytales with their giddily absurd plots of switched twins and “the three bears” quests.
But fundamentally Three Smart Girls works as the un-Parent Trap. As I discussed in my analysis of the latter film, what makes The Parent Trap such a fascinating and uncanny film is its linking of the daughter’s adolescence with the parents’ thwarted erotic relationship. Budding into the beginning of womanhood, Hayley Mills must discover her parents as sexual beings so that she will be capable of forming her own adult relationships at some future point. And her parents must come to terms with each other’s sexual natures so that they can accept their stormy-sweet interdependence. This last phase of the 1961 film astutely sidelines the daughters and puts the focus on the parents and their renewed exploration of marital eros.
By contrast, the parents in Three Smart Girls have no erotic natures to be contended with. The mother makes a brief appearance at the film’s start: a pale ghost who has spent the last decade weeping in a house decorated with portraits of her ex- husband. The father (Charles Winninger) is small and usually exasperated, a wealthy man who lives in a home outfitted with all kinds of exercise equipment that do not seem to reduce his paunch.
Although the father now has a much younger fiancée—the aptly-named and aptly-dressed Miss Lyons (Binnie Barnes), who first appears in leopard-print trim—he projects less a desire for youth (like the dads in the two The Parent Trap movies) than a mere wish for flattery.
By contrast, the three girls are already bursting with life and beauty. Within hours of their arrival in New York, the two older ones attract handsome, marriageable mates. (One sub-plot, the most enjoyable in the film, involves a comic confusion of identity between the middle sister’s chivalrous love-match and a penniless scoundrel.) To a great extent, the father’s planned remarriage seems a plot device to get the girls go to NYC which offers a proper arena for their winsome vivacity.
One even wonders at first why the daughters are so devoted to their father and trying to reunite him with their mother. The father has not seen the daughters in ten years and cannot identify them properly when they meet. He can barely tolerate their presence and wants to ship them off at the first opportunity.
Yet the daughters plot amongst themselves on how to get rid of Miss Lyons. “Some savage tribes put honey all over people and let the ants devour them,” one whispers, when they listen to the gold-digger serenading their father on the piano. Her sister responds: “I read about a man who invented a ray that positively shrivels people at 200 yeards.”
But it is the youngest sister who rekindles their father’s paternal interest. Penny interrupts the musical performance by Miss Lyons by moving her bed around on the floor above. When the father goes upstairs to chide her and the bed breaks he for the first time escapes his self-importance and laughs. Beds and bedrooms are important in the movie. When the father later returns to the girls’ bedroom to bid his daughters good night, Penny sings to him: “Someone To Care For Me,” which Miss Lyons had sung earlier, but now with Durbin’s operatic sweetness and orchestral backdrop.
Later, on the eve of the father’s planned wedding to Miss Lyons, Penny goes into her father’s bedroom. “Do you love Miss Lyons?” she asks. “More than us?” She cries that she can’t bear to see her mother unhappy. Comforting her, her father puts her to sleep on a couch in his bedroom. “Your daddy will tuck you in,” he says to the 14 year old. “Good night, baby.” The fantasy here is that the ten years of separation have never passed.
Three Smart Girls reverses the direction of The Parent Trap: back to pre-adolescence, with marital sexuality erased or sublimated into a father-daughter romance. Penny gets her man at the film’s end as her sisters do—but her man is her father, whom she “gets” by reuniting him with his safely asexual ex-wife. The marriage to Miss Lyons never takes place, of course.
In the final scene the mother arrives in New York by ship. Penny lifts her father’s arm to make him greet his ex-wife. Prim and silent—no Maureen O’Hara, the scorching mom in The Parent Trap—the mother is introduced to both of the older sisters’ fiancés, and then to her ex-husband. “And this is my daddy,” Penny says, making the reintroduction. Mother and father shake hands tentatively in front of Penny’s smiling face. Her older sisters to be married off, Penny has reconstituted the family romance of childhood.
The movie was nominated for Outstanding Production in the 1937 Academy Awards. I have not yet seen Three Smart Girls Grow Up (1939) and Hers To Hold (1943), the two sequels in the Three Smart Girls Cinematic Universe.